Linking Explicitly

With explicit linking, applications must make a function call to explicitly load the DLL at run time. To explicitly link to a DLL, an application must:

Call LoadLibrary (or a similar function) to load the DLL and obtain a module handle.

Call GetProcAddress to obtain a function pointer to each exported function that the application wants to call. Because applications are calling the DLL's functions through a pointer, the compiler does not generate external references, so there is no need to link with an import library.